Industry Connect

An ongoing challenge for industry is finding engineering graduates who are up to date on the latest trends and technology innovations in a particular field.  Employers want new hires who can plug in and be productive from day one, instead of requiring costly and time-consuming training to get them up to speed.  The challenge for engineering schools, on the other hand, is innovating new ways to educate and develop workers who can hit the ground running and contribute immediately to fast-paced, team-oriented, technology-driven workplaces.

Assistant Professor Chinweike Eseonu discusses internship experience with students.

Chinweike Eseonu, an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Oregon State, is working to close this gap between what industry wants to see in new employees and the graduates engineering schools are producing. “There’s a trend toward engineers and engineering managers who are better able to not just manage the technical processes, but also to manage the social interactions — from managing teams effectively to developing strategy,” he said.

The School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (MIME) is trying to close this industry-university gap by reimaging and retooling the traditional student internship. The emerging internship model directly engages a faculty member in the internship, enabling the instructor to stay close to industry issues and gain awareness of the most current trends, technologies, and research challenges.

“This is an internship where a student and a faculty member are both engaged with a company,” said Eseonu. “It’s relationship-building with a faculty member that then involves a student, as opposed to an industry relationship with just a student.”

For example, throughout a student’s time at the university working on a master’s degree, he or she might spend six months as an employee, then six months back on campus working on problems designed to solve specific needs of the company, then six months back at the company.

The end product of such a retooled internship, Eseonu said, is three-fold: 1) an engineering graduate who is tailored for a organization or company and is intimately familiar with the latest trends and technology of that industry, 2) a faculty member with hands-on access to real-world projects and research challenges who can use this knowledge to inform and update curriculums, and 3) a company that ultimately employs a new worker who requires very little training.

“The company actually gets two products,” Eseonu said. “A highly employable person, plus the flow of knowledge back to the faculty member, who can use it to better train future students.”

Although large companies can usually afford to spend time and money on training new employees in depth, small companies often don’t have the finances or staff for such training. In Oregon, where the majority of businesses are small and the focus is on technology and innovation, Oregon State is well suited to facilitate this kind of student preparation, because of its emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration.

“As the land grant university here in Oregon, we want to be addressing these types of needs,” said Eseonu. “So this new internship approach is a perfect combination of the university’s roles of creating new knowledge and developing the future workforce.”

Eseonu works in human systems engineering, which involves the use of engineering methods informed by other sciences (physical, biological, informational, social, and managerial) to improve human–machine, human–human, and human–organization systems. His research suggests that the end results of such internships will be much more cost effective to companies.

Under the leadership of Rob Stone and John Parmigiani, MIME has initiated a number of these internships with regional companies. “These are such a powerful tool because as faculty learn, the student is learning, and the company is getting a better understanding of what the university is doing and our capabilities. So it becomes a real synergy,” said Eseonu. “It’s really a win-win-win.”

The internships also help address any gaps in textbook content, which can lag behind real-world technology development and innovation by as much as two years. “As faculty, I can bring this current, real-world information right into the classroom,” he said.

But the key, he said, is communicating the idea to industry. “There is this amorphous collection of talent at a university, and it’s often difficult to communicate this effectively to people in industry, in terms of how research is conducted at universities and how we can partner with industry to help.”

Eseonu believes that a good way to better connect and communicate with industry is via the College of Engineering’s Industrial Advisory Boards, which have been in place for some time but are being reconfigured to engage more faculty and stimulate better university-industry discussions and information flow.

MIME faculty often meet with the Industrial Advisory Board; meetings are scheduled to coincide with other faculty events to make participation easier.  “These meetings offer an excellent way to make connections, interact, and discuss our research with industry,” Eseonu said.

One of Eseonu’s research areas involves creating frameworks that better enable community needs to inform university research and technology innovation, which supports local industry. He offered the example of a community in need of a water treatment plant, detailing how a university could engage with the community early to learn specific needs in that particular location. This engagement could result in a new technology, which a local company could then license. Ultimately, the university would develop a workforce to address a community’s needs and, in the long term, students from this community could study at the local university.

“That’s the social relevance piece — this loop where the community need matches with students coming to OSU, and then feeds back to organizations and local industry in terms of intellectual capital,” Eseonu said. “What we’re talking about in all of this is community need driving university innovation and supporting industry’s needs.”

— Gregg Kleiner